Good Morning Britain: Positive reviews as Susanna Reid makes ITV debut

Critics and viewers have delivered their verdict on ITV's latest breakfast programme, fronted by Susanna Reid.

Good Morning Britain launched on Monday, with exclusives from Paul O'Grady and One Direction.

The presenters sat at a glass table, rather than Daybreak's sofa, mirroring the style of US TV's morning shows .

Daily Telegraph writer Michael Hogan gave the show three stars out of five, saying: "BBC Breakfast might just have a viable rival".

"Recent big money BBC-to-ITV defectees, notably Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, have struggled in their new home. On this evidence, Reid should settle in more easily," he added.

Digital Spy's Alex Fletcher called the launch show "quite dizzying" but added "everyone has their best smile on and has done their vocal warm-ups".

The Mirror's live-blogger Rob Leigh said: "They're smiling so much their faces will need planning permission for grinny extensions."

Alongside Reid, who is on a rumoured £400,000 contract, the presentation team includes former Sky presenters Ben Shephard, Sean Fletcher and Charlotte Hawkins.

Andi Peters was also on the show, presenting a quiz feature called Wheel of Cash on location from Kirkgate Market in Leeds.

The first edition ran fairly smoothly, although there was a slightly sticky moment when the weather presenter referred viewers to the Daybreak website during the 07:45 update.

Good Morning Britain's main exclusive was with Paul O'Grady - giving his first interview since he was in hospital late last year with recurring heart problems.

Digital Spy's Fletcher wrote: "The first 'big guest' on Good Morning Britain is Paul O'Grady talking about his recovery from his latest heart attack. It's not exactly A-list and it's a strange shift from the fast-paced hard news style of the rest of the show. However, Ben and Susanna are more adept at switching between the desk and the sofa than any of the Daybreak hosts ever were."

Chiles and Bleakley presented their final show in December 2011

Yahoo News said the programme had a "shaky start" and listed "teething issues" that included distracting graphics and quick camera cuts.

Reviewer Rachel MacGregor was particularly unimpressed with the opening sequence, noting: "Reid, Shephard, Fletcher and Hawkins each read a news story directly to the camera before the next presenter jumped in with another headline. The frequent handovers meant that we saw little interaction between the hosts to begin with, so any mention of their 'chemistry' seemed very forced."

However, she added, "as time went on the presenters seemed to become more comfortable with each other".

Stateside comparisons

ITV This Morning presenter, Holly Willoughby, was impressed, tweeting: "Good Morning Britain is looking rather lovely... Good morning y'all!"

Regular viewers on Twitter had mixed feelings, with one writing: "#Good Morning Britain looks like loose women crossed with Nintendo Wii's version of Sky Sports News."

Louise Minchin is currently presenting BBC Breakfast with Bill Turnbull

But former BBC Three and BBC London television presenter, Matt Cooketweeted: "Very slick, fresh US look for @GMB - seems to have far fewer ads than usual ITV morning shows. And @andipeters is back too - hurrah!"

Another viewer, Andrew Trythall, tweeted: "#GoodMorningBritain was a great looking show, fast-paced, fresh and engaging. Great directing @errongordon. Well done to the whole team."

And Helena Cauldon also praised the programme on Twitter: "Loved the new-look Good Morning Britain today - great launch."

Kaine Milner wrote: "I'm definitely a fan of this new "#GoodMorningBritain show @GMB, faster paced news, less adverts and just generally better than dreary BBC."

But Patricia O'Neill wasn't impressed, tweeting: "Thought I was watching the wrong channel!! Bring back the sofa with Kate and Aled!!"

And Margaret Oliver tweeted: "@GMB sorry doesn't do it for me. Bring back Daybreak."

Several commentators likened the look of the new programme to ABC's long-running breakfast show Good Morning America.

"Good Morning Amer... sorry, Britain! Yes, with its four-strong team of presenters - the women clad in primary colours - seated around a big glass desk, and a weather expert who gets to add her two cents to the chat, ITV's new breakfast news show owes a lot to its stateside counterpart," wrote Paul Jones in his Radio Times review.

The Daily Mail, however, was not a fan of the desk, complaining it hid Reid's legs from view.

"Later on the show, however, Susanna moved from behind the desk, giving viewers the chance to catch a glimpse of her enviable pins," it reported.

Good Morning Britain replaces ITV's previous breakfast show, Daybreak, which launched to great fanfare in 2010.

The show, fronted by former One Show hosts Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, saw a temporary boost in viewing figures, but they soon settled back to previous levels and the presenters were sidelined. The show ran through four editors in its brief lifespan.

The name Good Morning Britain was previously used by ITV from 1983 to 1992, and is chiefly associated with Anne Diamond and Nick Owen.

Louise Minchin has been presenting BBC Breakfast alongside Bill Turnbull since Reid left - an announcement about a permanent replacement is expected in the autumn.

Survivors of Tornado in Mayflower, Arkansas, Recount Ordeal

A survivor of Sunday's deadly tornado outbreak in the Plains and South told of the struggle to hold a cellar door shut as the storm roared overhead.

Becky Naylor, 57, of Mayflower, Arkansas, said her family heard reports of tornado debris falling nearby before rushing to their storm cellar where they were "packed like sardines."Naylor told The Associated Press that there were more than 20 people in the cellar as several passing residents also dived in for shelter.

"Everyone is welcome to come into it," she told the AP. "In fact, people were pulling off the highways and were just running in."

She said the men of the group held shut the cellar doors while the tornado did its best to pull them open.

"It sounded like a constant rolling, roaring sound," she said. "Trees were really bending and the light poles were actually shaking and moving. That's before we shut the door and we've only shut the door to the storm cellar two times."Mark Ausbrooks was at his parents' house in the area when the storm came.

"It turned pitch black," Mark Ausbrooks told the AP. "I ran and got pillows to put over our heads and ... all hell broke loose. My parents' home, it's gone completely."

Mayflower resident Jacci Juniel went to find her son as the storm approached and was caught away from her home when it hit.She told her 96-year-old mother was still in the house and suffered cuts when the storm blew out a window.

"We had to climb over trees and power lines and underneath trees. I was just trying to get home to my mom," Juniel said.

Star Wars The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic succeeded Sony's Star Wars Galaxiesas the main Star Wars MMO, Galaxies went permanently offline shortly before The Old Republic was released in December 2011. Set over three hundred years after the events of the Knights of the Old Republic games, The Old Republic features seventeen fully-explorable planets, eight unique classes divided into the Galactic Republic and Sith Empire factions, and over 1,600 hours of story in addition to over a dozen group Flash points and Operations, and it is the first MMORPG to feature full-scale voice acting. The game features extensive references to pre-existing Star Wars continuity, and introduces thousands of new characters, locations, items, groups, and events to the Star Wars universe as it depicts the conflict between the Republic and the Empire.

Over one million subscribers registered in the first three days following the The Old Republic's release, and over a million had begun to play The Old Republic by December 26, making it the fastest-growing subscription MMORPG in history. The Old Republichas received generally positive reviews from critics, with a score of 85 on the review aggregation website Metacritic, though it has received some criticism by players for the lack of late-game content, which has led the game's developers to focus on the addition of upper-level content in many of their updates. Due to declining subscription numbers during the summer of 2012, The Old Republic introduced a Free-to-Play option in November 2012, and the game's first digital expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, was released in April 2013. As ofFebruary 2014, The Old Republic has received fourteen significant content updates, and the second Digital Expansion, Galactic Starfighter, was released to free-to-play users in February 2014. Galactic Starfighter was released to active subscribers on December 3, 2013, and was released to Preferred Status players on January 14. A third Digital Expansion, Galactic Strongholds, is set for release in the summer of 2014.

Why the U.S. government is 'trolling' jihadists on social media

"We don't negotiate with terrorists," has long been the standard refrain of governments when it comes to
violent extremists.

But these days, in the realm of social media, at least, they are talking to them.

In recent years, the U.S. State Department has launched social media efforts to engage jihadists and their sympathizers online, contesting their claims with the intention of dissuading potential converts to Islamic extremism.

Nasir al-Wuhayshi, head of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in a still from an al Qaeda propaganda video released this week.

"We are actually giving al Qaeda the benefit of the doubt because we are answering their arguments," says Alberto Fernandez, coordinator of the State Department's Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), which runs the program. "The way I see it is we are participating in the marketplace of ideas."That marketplace is now online, and the corners of it dedicated to Islamic extremist talk can be surreal, noisy, sometimes horrifying places.

Jihadist social media: Decapitations, appeals for wives

Like no conflict before, the Syrian war, the prime focus of the world's jihadists, is being discussed, disputed -- and waged, in its propaganda aspects -- on social media.

The content ranges from the shockingly grisly to the bizarre. Combatants post photos of decapitated heads as trophies of battlefield victories, or images of victims from their own side, captioned with vows to avenge them.

Links to grainy phone-camera footage abound, documenting everything from group executions, to a video appeal summoning Muslim women to come to Syria to find a husband among the Islamist rebels. On Twitter, jihadists post their theological quandaries: how to watch football when it means being exposed to men's bare legs?

Often informed by the memes and language of the broader Internet, the content is disseminated swiftly around the world through a diverse network of jihadists and their supporters, journalists, analysts and onlookers.In this way, social media has become a prime conduit for motivating budding extremists to take up arms.

A study just published by researchers at King's College London traces how Western-based radical preachers with strong social media influence have inspired a wave of Western Muslims to fight in Syria, where they are now estimated to account for about a quarter of the 11,000 foreign jihadists in the country.

In response to this threat, the U.S. government has been "messaging" in social media in Arabic, Urdu and Somali for three years now, attempting to penetrate the virtual echo chambers of jihadist thought with contrary points of view.

But it is only since their English-language Twitter feed was launched in December, becoming a pugnacious new voice in the conversation, that their efforts have increasingly drawn attention -- and raised eyebrows -- in the West.

This development has led to the spectacle of the U.S. government publicly bickering with jihadists and their ideological fellow travelers on social media, debating Syria, the War on Terror, "the clash of civilizations" in 140-character bursts.A typical exchange occurred recently when a pro-jihadist Twitter user admiringly posted an image of a desecrated Buddha of Bamiyan, one of the monumental statues in Afghanistan destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The CSCC account tweeted in response: "Destroying ancient culture out of hatred and backwardness are a feature of al Qaeda's ideology."

"Crying about so-called ancient culture when there was no food and children were dying out of hunger," scoffed the Islamist. "The shortage of food in Afghanistan was due to Taliban's disastrous policies," replied the State Department account.

Another user chimed in with a tweet at the State Department: "Al Qaeda just bombed a kindergarten and school with your funding and guns."

Trolling the terrorists?

Some observers have been dismissive of the State Department's efforts, conducted under the banner: "Think Again, Turn Away." Jonathan Krohn, a journalist who, with a colleague, has launched a Twitter account and podcast dedicated to jihadist social media, and sometimes tussles with the State Department account online, describes their activities as "trolling."

"As a psy-op tool, it's pretty laughable," he said. "They target journalists and analysts with as much verve as attacking jihadis."

But others say the efforts appeaFor years, al Qaeda had gotten in the heads of the U.S. government, and the U.S. government had become very sensitive to various al Qaeda talking points," says Will McCants, a scholar of militant Islam at the Brookings Institution, who was involved in setting up the CSCC.

"I felt there's no reason why we can't return that favor... The more you can make them think on these points, the more you can damage their credibility and shape their behavior."

For his part, Fernandez, a former U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea, rejects the "State Department troll" label.

"Some people use that because I think it's convenient shorthand for an adversarial relationship," he said. "To me, (a troll) ... is a person who is annoying and obnoxious and stupid. Well, we're none of those things, because we're answering their charges with facts."

But he admits to drawing on the same emotional arsenal as an Internet troll in the center's work.

"People who study the Internet more than I do... mention that the two things that motivate people the most when it comes to social media are comedy and anger," he said. "If you're talking about al Qaeda -- let's face it, it's going to be negative. So it might as well be pointed."

'An ungoverned space'

For the U.S. government, entering the social media fray to argue with terrorists has required a substantial paradigm shift. The default posture had been not to dignify the extremists with a response. But gradually, said Fernandez, the government realized that doing so was simply surrendering ground to their opponents. to having some success at "getting in the heads" of senior Islamic militants.We seek to contest space that previously had been ceded to our adversary," he said. Al Qaeda tends to thrive in "the ungoverned spaces of the world," such as "the Sahara desert, or places in Somalia or Yemen or Syria. The Internet is also an ungoverned space, so it's an area of opportunity for them."

Al Qaeda has long publicly acknowledged the crucial importance of propaganda to their cause, he said, with its leader Ayman al-Zawahiri quoted as saying that "more than half" their battle to win the hearts and minds of Muslims was being waged through media.

"We in the West think kinetic strikes or arresting people or fighting... that's important," said Fernandez. "Media stuff... it's secondary or tertiary. Al Qaeda doesn't see it that way."

The aim was also, broadly, to make "life more difficult for the extremists." "It's very easy if you're out there and able to say whatever you want and nobody contradicts you," said FernandezMcCants said the online space taken up by jihadist chatter has expanded and become much more diffuse in recent years, as it had migrated from discussion boards to social media platforms like Twitter, and been increasingly conducted in English.

"There are many more people talking," he said, adding that while that meant they could be harder to find, "once you find them you really can insert yourself and engage directly. They have to listen to it, at least until they block you."

Fernandez said the CSCC's efforts were aimed not at converting extremists -- although "it would be nice" -- but reaching the wider audience of onlookers that jihadists were trying to influence. "In a way, we're picking a fight with the extremists, because the extremists are there to radicalize other people," he said.

Their "bread and butter" was using jihadists' own content to make the case against them, he said, such as when they recently hijacked a hashtag in Arabic -- "accomplishments of the Islamic state" -- that had been started by supporters of the bloodthirsty Islamist militant group ISIS.The CSCC account used the hashtag on 176 tweets that Fernandez said listed the true achievements of ISIS: "Things like poverty, murder, detracting from the decency of the Syrian revolution, helping the Assad regime by trading oil with them."

Is it working?

Studies have pointed to the potential shortcomings of this kind of work: that the counter-messaging is simply ignored, as Krohn suggests it often is, or stirs up antagonism by providing an opponent for extremists to rally against.

So is the project working well enough to justify its 50 staff and a $5 million a year budget?

Fernandez says feedback had been positive and the work would continue, although it was difficult to quantify results objectively. "We are never going to know ... unless they put up their hand and say 'I saw your stuff and decided not to become a terrorist'," he said. "You're almost never going to get that."

The initiative, already active across Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, would look to branch out to other social media where jihadists were active. "What about Ask.fm? What about Instagram? What about Pinterest?" said Fernandez. "In a way, we're mirroring or shadowing what they do."

McCants said he considered the program "a qualified success," and that criticisms of the work tended not to be data-driven.

"I don't think anyone believes this has been a dramatic blow against terrorism recruitment... But I think on this particular measure of getting inside the heads of terrorist recruiters and leaders -- at least in the al Qaeda orbit -- it has been successful."

He believed jihadist groups had been rattled by certain of the CSCC's claims -- in particular, that the victims of Islamic extremists were predominantly other Muslims. It was possible to tell when messaging had struck a nerve, he said, as jihadist leaders would typically respond "by putting messages out on the discussion boards saying, 'Listen, they're putting these lies out, don't engage them'."

"We got quite good at this during the Cold War, and then we forgot, because as the only superpower, we didn't really have to do it," he said. "(But) the U.S. government is rediscovering its skills in this sort of thing."

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